60-Word Addition to the Basic Bio:

Lucy was born in South Carolina but grew up in San Angelo, Texas. She currently lives in Worthington, Ohio with her husband and occasional co-author Gary A. Braunbeck.

If genres were wall-building nations, Lucy's stories would be forging passports, jumping fences, swimming rivers and dodging bullets. You can learn more about her at www.lucysnyder.com.

100-Word Expansion to the Addition:

Lucy has a BS in biology and an MA in journalism and is a graduate of the 1995 Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Workshop; her classmates included authors Kelly Link and Nalo Hopkinson.

She has worked as a computer systems specialist, science writer, biology tutor, researcher, software reviewer, radio news editor, and bassoon instructor. In her past life as an editor, she published Dark Planet and selected poetry and software reviews for HMS Beagle. She currently produces a column for Horror World on science and technology for writers and coordinates the writing workshops at the annual Context conference.

50-Word Biography (Poetry-Specific):

Lucy A. Snyder is the author of the collections Chimeric Machines and Sparks and Shadows. Her poetry has appeared in Full Unit Hookup, Strange Horizons, Chiaroscuro, Snow Monkey, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and Greatest Uncommon Denominator. She also served as a poetry editor for HMS Beagle.

A Few Photos

Please remember to give credit to the photographers (mouse over the images to see the photo credits):

Early Influences

My parents dutifully tried to interest me in stereotypically girly things like dolls and clothes, but it didn't really work. Tea sets became bunkers for toy soldiers defending the realm against marauding Raggedy Annes. Hairbrushes were more likely to be used as pretend pistols and daggers than to be put to their intended use. I liked Barbies, but only because I could take the tall plastic boots off the dolls, put them on my fingers, and imagine that my hand was a giant stompy multilegged monster (my toy soldiers led a hard existence).

I grew up in a house full of books. My parents read to me every night when I was little -- mostly fairy tales and children's fantasy like the Oz books and Alice in Wonderland -- and taught me to treat books as something special. This more than anything inspired me to become a writer. My mother loved literature and the arts; my father, a physician by profession, is an accomplished amateur painter and photographer. My mother's first husband, John Grindley, wrote A Season on the Coast, which was published by The Dial Press in 1969. I've never met John, and didn't correspond with him until I was in my 30s, but I knew about him pretty early on. Because he had written a novel and then gone gallivanting away to places like Guatemala and Saudi Arabia, he was a shadowy figure of cool in my young mind.

My parents took me on car trips all over the southern and western U.S. when I was very young (to this day, the sound and motion of riding in the back seat of a sedan on the highway makes me sleepy). We went to zoos, museums, national parks and forests, and consequently I became very interested in science and nature (my parents were pleased that at least this part of their plan worked). I also became fascinated by pirates after visiting some restored ships. (But who doesn't like pirates? Well, aside from people who've been looted and pillaged. And the RIAA. Arr.)

A huge influence was the United States Space & Rocket Center at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, where my father's aunt and mother lived. Whenever we went to visit, they'd take me to the museum, and the notion of space travel caught my fancy and kept it. Once I was old enough to read anything of substance, I grabbed pretty much anything with a space ship or a fantastic creature on the cover that appeared on the school library's shelves.

It was Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time that simultaneously hooked me as a lifelong science fiction/fantasy reader and fixed me on the idea of writing fantasy and SF instead of mainstream work. I remember that the book spoke to me in a way that nothing I'd read until then really had, and I had that shivery sense of wonder you get with really good speculative fiction. And I thought to myself that if I could write something that made another person feel the way I was feeling, then that would have to be the best job in the world.

My Book Covers

Click on the thumbnails below to navigate to print-quality versions at Flickr: